The mobile gaming market is the newest arm in the video gaming space, only really taking off following the popularisation of the iPhone in 2007. Despite its youth, the humble cell phone is a place where all established gaming companies are desperate to head. Though a few have made this move with great success, others have worked themselves into a corner with little recourse. Taking a look at mobile’s popularity and the challenges traditional developers face reveals some interesting truths about what could come next, and why mobiles are going to continue to play a key part in gaming’s future.
Mobile Domination
Mobile games existed before the smartphone, but the improved software and store support as popularised by the iPhone opened the doors wider than ever before. Titles like Gangstar: Crime City and Tetris started small in the mobile space, but soon earned their companies millions, as part of franchises worth billions. This was a development that no game developer could overlook, but jumping in could prove difficult for the more established names.
“Tetris” (CC BY-SA 2.0) by avatar-1
Meanwhile, the related industry of online casino gaming was perfectly poised to make its mark. Here, games could be ported to mobiles without much effort, easily fitting to vertical displays and touch controls. This continues to be the case, with titles like the Fluffy Favourites slot benefiting from everything smartphones have to offer. This title requires little data and processing power, it has an instantly attractive and adorable look, and as such it was well suited to the mobile platform. Back in 2020, this move towards mobile had come so far that 70% of online casino revenue came from the mobile space, and casinos weren’t alone.
By 2020, the mobile video game market was valued at $77.2 billion, according to Newzoo. Despite being only 13 years in the mainstream, this vastly exceeded that of PC ($36.9 billion) and consoles ($45.2 billion). Yet, despite this success and the value it provided, few of the biggest video games on mobile came from companies that cut their teeth in traditional gaming.
Unmaking AAA Gaming’s Bed
Gaming on consoles and PC has long chased a standard of making games bigger and better looking. The merit of this argument is often debated, with many longtime gamers arguing for “shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more”. Though this is a popular meme as reported by NME, it’s a sentiment that many gamers stand by, to avoid the kind of bloat that commonly affects modern AAA gaming.
As it just so happens, this bloat has served as a thorn in the side of traditional gaming developers. Bigger and better-looking games might look great on game boxes, but they’re the antithesis of what mobiles do well. Mobiles need games to be smaller and without bleeding-edge 3D graphics, and this is exactly what AAA developers have spent decades telling players they don’t want. Sure, the potential profit means these developers want to go mobile, but having spent so long conditioning millions of players against what mobiles stand for, they only ended up playing themselves.
“813000_20180605030726_1” (CC BY 2.0) by Whelsko
Don’t expect many AAA series to feature full-fledged releases on mobiles anytime soon. The cost of contradicting the traditional AAA gaming message by limiting the scale of multiplatform releases on other systems is too great for this to ever become standard. That said, spinoff games for smartphones like PUBG Mobile illustrate a happy resting point at which every AAA will be setting its sights. Whether or not they’re able to hit is another question entirely, but as long as mobiles continue to dominate, this new split direction will illustrate a new status quo.